Update:I've started to build it up and I have even more respect for the amount of detail Ahren had to consider when building it. This is one complicated frame and it's impressive that everything fits so perfectly. Many racing frames with half the braze-ons don't come close to being this well thought out.

The French bars and stems arrived this afternoon and I've used one of the porteur bars on the city bike. It looks great and is a nice shape.

I'll drill and mount the chain guard and fenders in the morning when I'm fresh, otherwise most of the components are on the frame.

23 comments:

Michael S
said...

That's really sweet. I've been checking Ahren's blog regularly for any photos, but he hasn't updated it in months. I'm looking forward to seeing it built up. Have you found a source for the chain guard?

We are just starting to do complete bikes. But we can't find a chainguard like that for every bike, though we do have some other neat models in stock.

That's a regular Stronglight 93 crank with bolts for a single ring. Did you know that Stronglights still makes the rings to fit that crank? Nice as it is, it'll be replaced with a Nevar. the Stronglight is just too busy looking and it doesn't seem right with the flowing lines of the chainguard.

I like the bars a lot. The stems are pretty too. The bike will get reverse levers soon, but there was no time to drill the bars today. And the bars will be taped and shellaced.

The next two bikes will have internal gear hubs. We will build them fixed, single speed, internal geared hub, rear dérailleur and with two dérailleurs. The basic geometry stays the same, but the drive-train is up to the customer.

I actually would have preferred an internal gear hub on my bike, but I wanted to try one with a derailleur to see how it would work with the chainguard and with the eventual chain case.

Those CLB chainguards are neat, what with the art nouveau styling along with a superbly practical shape to keep one’s trousers away from the dirty stuff. It’s actually a very common design in Europe, although the ones I’ve seen must be knockoffs because they have the circle but no “CLB” in them. I saw one in Paris that had a little color painting of Jesus Christ in that circle – now that’s gotta give you bit of a tailwind …

I found one of these (no CLB logo) and have put it on my current beater-to-porteur project. I’ll send along a picture when that gets done. I think you guys will give it a thumbs-up.

/david_nj, who cannot figure out how to work this new blogging sign-in thing

Contary to my earlier sanguinity, it turned out to be devilishly hard to mount the bar-end brake levers in those Nitto porteur-type bars. The difference in diameter is just too great. The fellow who I'd asked to do the machining was super nice and made up a new set of bases for the levers -- visually identical but machined out of a block much stronger alloy. Those cast bases just don't take to machining very well, and the bars would really have to be reamed out to accommodate the levers, to the point that I think there's a real chance of breaking.

Chris,Regarding the TA style bottle cages, have you considered a run of handelbar mounted cages?Some of us have frames without bottle bosses.Besides, they do look pretty cool on the stem and bars.Bill in Rockville